Monday, April 27, 2009

Suze Oh-Man!

This is really a geek rant, but before I get off on that bit... when the hell did Suze Orman go all soft? She used to be a hard ass, tell-you-what-you-need-to-hear chick. Now she's all "poor you. It's the economy." This is the same chick that ranted and raved when folks bought more house than they could afford and leveraged it with some god awful interest only loan.... Now she's feeling all sorry for those folks. But like I said. This is a geek rant.

So its "Green Week" this week and Suze has all these ever so helpful tips from her viewers -- how to save money and save the planet. One viewer calls in and says she is teaching her child to be green by turning off all the lights for one hour every day. And low and behold, she's saving $40 a month by doing just that! That's awesome. That's terrific. That's great. That's also a big load of crap.

Let's just take a look at this, shall we?

  • $40 a month savings by turning off the lights for one hour a day
  • that boils down to $1.33 a day
  • assuming $0.1202 per kWh (which is what I pay, and our rates are known to be a little high)
  • that means 11.0026 KWh savings a day (or 332.78 KWh a month)

Holy frickin moly. That's a lot of lights burning in an hour. Consider a standard CFL with 100w equivalent burns 25w. (She's saving the planet, remember, she MUST be running CFLs.)

Given one bulb for an hour is 25 w/h and she is saving 11,002.6 w/h -- she is turning off 440 lights. If you're burning 440 lights at in your house at any given time, your problem isn't with lighting. She's either full of crap, has a house the size of Home Depot or she's got a marijuana farm in the basement and she's turning off the grow lights.

4 comments:

Og Make Blog said...

It's the grow lights, definitely.

Kari said...

Do you think she factored in the loss of growth on the basement farm when turning the lights off for one hour per day?

Og Make Blog said...

Probably not. That extra 30 hours of light probably would earn a lot more in the end product.... certainly more than $40 worth.

BTW, I liked the 'hard ass' Suze better, too.

Kari said...

She also seems to be "Forgetful Suze" since she used to recommend a lot of the things she now despises.